A data center may be defined as a location, for instance, a room, that houses computer systems arranged in a number of racks. A standard rack, for example, an electronics cabinet, is defined as an Electronics Industry Association (EIA) enclosure, 78 in. (2 meters) high, 24 in. (0.61 meter) wide and 30 in. (0.76 meter) deep. These racks are configured to house a number of computer systems, about forty (40) systems, with future configurations of racks being designed to accommodate 200 or more systems. The computer systems typically include a number of printed circuit boards (PCBs), mass storage devices, power supplies, processors, micro-controllers, and semi-conductor devices, that dissipate relatively significant amounts of heat during their operation. For example, a typical computer system comprising multiple microprocessors dissipates approximately 250 W of power. Thus, a rack containing forty (40) computer systems of this type dissipates approximately 10 KW of power.
The power required to transfer the heat dissipated by the components in the racks to the cool air contained in the data center is generally equal to about 10 percent of the power needed to operate the components. However, the power required to remove the heat dissipated by a plurality of racks in a data center is generally equal to about 50 percent of the power needed to operate the components in the racks. The disparity in the amount of power required to dissipate the various heat loads between racks and data centers stems from, for example, the additional thermodynamic work needed in the data center to cool the air. In one respect, racks are typically cooled with fans that operate to move cooling air across the heat dissipating components; whereas, data centers often implement reverse power cycles to cool heated return air. The additional work required to achieve the temperature reduction, in addition to the work associated with moving the cooling fluid in the data center and the condenser, often add up to the 50 percent power requirement. As such, the cooling of data centers presents problems in addition to those faced with the cooling of the racks.
Conventional data centers are typically cooled by operation of one or more computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units. For example, compressors of CRAC units typically consume a minimum of about thirty (30) percent of the required operating energy to sufficiently cool the data centers. The other components, for example, condensers and air movers (fans), typically consume an additional twenty (20) percent of the required total operating energy. As an example, a high density data center with 100 racks, each rack having a maximum power dissipation of 10 KW, generally requires 1 MW of cooling capacity. CRAC units with a capacity of 1 MW of heat removal generally requires a minimum of 300 KW input compressor power in addition to the power needed to drive the air moving devices, for instance, fans and blowers. Conventional data center CRAC units do not vary their cooling fluid output based on the distributed needs of the data center. Instead, these CRAC units generally operate at or near a maximum compressor power level even when the heat load is reduced inside the data center.
The substantially continuous operation of the CRAC units is generally designed to operate according to a worst-case scenario. For example, CRAC units are typically designed around the maximum capacity and redundancies are utilized so that the data center may remain on-line on a substantially continual basis. However, the computer systems in the data center may only utilize around 30–50% of the maximum cooling capacity. In this respect, conventional cooling systems often attempt to cool components that may not be operating at a level which may cause their temperatures to exceed a predetermined temperature range. Consequently, many conventional cooling systems often incur greater amounts of operating expenses than may be necessary to sufficiently cool the heat generating components contained in the racks of data centers.
Other types of conventional CRAC units are configured to vary the temperature of the cooling fluid as well as the volume flow rate of the cooling fluid supplied into the data center. These types of CRAC units often include cooling systems configured to vary the temperature of the received cooling fluid prior to delivery into the data center. The cooling systems include variable capacity compressors and chilled water systems. In addition, these CRAC units also include blowers with variable frequency drives configured to vary the volume flow rate of the cooling fluid delivered into the data center.
Conventionally, data centers are initially designed based upon uniform criteria for thermal management irrespective of rack configuration and power density. In this regard, data centers are typically designed without regard to the effects of heterogeneous heat loads and airflow. Instead, data centers are typically designed based upon intuition as the primary tool to guide the placement and re-arrangement of data center cooling infrastructures and resources. Consequently, conventional data centers oftentimes have infrastructures that are not efficiently designed for varying heat loads and airflows. In this regard, the energy required to cool the components contained in the racks is usually consumed in inefficient manners as additional energy is required to compensate for the non-optimized data center layouts.